


day one dark

by wereheretostay



Category: Interstellar (2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-25
Updated: 2014-11-25
Packaged: 2018-02-26 22:49:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2669297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wereheretostay/pseuds/wereheretostay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>she stays until her body silences and stills, she stays until all her tears have been shed and all of her thoughts and angry words and yells no longer threatening to slide out of her lips and hurt the man in front of her because she knows she doesn't really hate him any more than she hates herself.</p><p>a little fic set a while into the future about brand/cooper on the now-established planet of Edmunds, because these two are my favorite</p>
            </blockquote>





	day one dark

Her smile is no brighter than it was the first time he met her. In fact, her whole face is saddened, empty, pale and hollowed out like she was halfway dead already, on her way to fading away into the dust that heavily blanketed the untouched ground. Her eyes are dark and red and blue-purple with wobbly veins that run up and down and criss-cross over her eyelids like roots of a tree that is too stubborn to let go of its last bit of life. 

Her hands are shaking as she curls her fingers around his shoulders, tight, red fists clutching his shoulders to make sure he doesn't leave her again. Her bones shake and shudder under her thin skin as he holds her close to him. He can hear her heartbeat, he can almost feel it beating through her chest, pressing and slamming against her ribs and the thin yet strong bones that keep it from ripping through her body with the force of her emotion. 

She stays in his arms for a long time. She stays until her body silences and stills, she stays until all her tears have been shed and all of her thoughts and angry words and yells are no longer threatening to slide out of her lips and hurt the man in front of her because she knows she doesn't really hate him any more than she hates herself. 

When she finally pulls back he's right there, strong and steady but, no - he's not, he's shaking and quivering like a lost child and he cups the side of her face because he needs to feel her again, touch her skin and experience all the things he was deprived of as he traveled with the stars with only the mere hope of seeing a human face again. 

And so she does the only thing she can think to do - crashes her lips onto his roughly because they've had enough time to be gentle - and afterwards she tells herself it's the wrong thing to do, but oh, the taste of his mouth and his hands on her neck and in her hair beg to differ. 

She tells herself that Edmunds is gone, his remains motionless and dry in a cryo-pod that was never meant to be as a coffin but, yet, maybe it was because after all, sleep is only a practice for death. 

She tells it to herself everyday, every second, repeats it like a mindless mantra that has forgotten its purpose and ceases to be encouraging. She tries to let him go, and she does. But there's still a knot in her stomach and a lump in her throat, hard and persistent and heated with memories that were never meant to be looked back on with a frown but instead a _remember the time we did this?_ and a warm hand hold. 

Maybe that's why the first time she's with him guilt racks her stomach and the lump seems to grow until all her senses are overtaken with pleasure and longing and heavy release until she finally tells herself that Edmunds is dead and gone and never coming back no matter how hard she tries to imagine her arms around his neck. 

But that first night, when she opened herself up to him and let him inside her mind and body, she knows it's the right thing to do. Being impartial and logical is only useful when you're handling numbers and data and not emotions and flushed skin, but with the way he looks at her in the middle of the night before she drifts off to sleep, her heart is made up without any objecting thoughts. 

More often then not she yells at him, snarls and screams about Miller and Doyle and Romilly and how it was his fault, but then she yells even louder because it wasn't his fault and it was hers. She'll scream it into his face, words angry and mean and wet when it's about her father and how he was recreant and reprobatious and viscous and then she'll cry because she loved him and she still does love him. She cries harder and harder each time, and he'll rock her back and forth even though he knows she doesn't like to be coddled. 

She listens when he yells, and he yells almost as often as she does. He yells about Murph and Tom and how he never got to tell his son that he loved him before he passed and that makes three people who he's lost without him being there to say good bye and four people whose deaths were on him. He tells her how he left as soon as he saw the life leave his daughtter's eyes because he was too weak and too broken to look on her cold body if she wasn't there to smile up at him.

Some nights he comes home and sighs because she's already there, curled up in a fancy, too-tight dress and still-perfect makeup, and other nights he comes home and gathers her into his arms because she's wearing nothing but his shirt and he can't think of any excuse to not touch her when her pale thighs look like that against his dark couch. 

And some nights he comes home to her angry face and he doesn't want to yell at her so instead he pulls her body towards his and kisses her until her makeup is smudged and her face is flushed. They crawl into bed together with her hogging the sheet because even if they haven't yet moved in together she thinks of it as her bed, because these days if she can manage to sleep, it's in his.

But most nights he kisses her and her mouth tastes like red wine and mint toothpaste and lipstick that ends up smearing off onto the pillow case with the rest of her makeup. He kisses her and she kisses him back until they run out of breath and she slips out of her dress and him out of his pants, and even if they don't do anything lying there next to each other is enough. 

They're both broken, cracked into jagged fragments and sharp pieces that can never be fully be put back together, but the long conversations and sleep-ridden touches and oh-so-rarely whispered _I love you's_ make up for it and help put back the pieces. Sometimes they cut themselves on the sharp edges, and sometimes they hurt each other with them because they've been through hell but in the end all that matters is him by her side, her hand in his.

And they're never letting go.


End file.
